To understand the full scale of the catastrophe that might be about to enfold British forces in southern Iraq, it is important to be clear about what happened on Monday. When two SAS men were waved down at a police checkpoint, they did not stop. Why not? Because the Iraqi police force has become so densely infiltrated by terrorists and extremists that they believed their lives would have been at risk. In May this year Basra’s chief of police, Hassan al-Sade, admitted that he had lost control of 75 per cent of his 13,750-strong force, and that his men were mainly loyal to one Shiite faction or another.
Faced with a checkpoint, therefore, the reaction of two undercover SAS men was not to hand over their papers to the legitimate organs of authority in Basra — supposedly the quietest and best-run part of Iraq outside the Kurdish areas — but to kill a policeman who may have presented no threat whatever to their lives. That was the first sign of a disastrous breakdown of trust between the British and the local police.
Later that day it became clear that the deterioration of civic structures was even worse. The Iraqi interior ministry decided that the British servicemen should be released from the Basra clink, and gave orders to that effect. The local police in Basra ignored the orders, and on the face of it one can see their point. One of their men had been shot, possibly in cold blood, by a British soldier, and they not unreasonably believed that there should be a judicial process.
On the other hand, one can also understand very well the decision, later in the day, by Brigadier John Lorimer, commander of 12 Mechanised Brigade, to storm the police station where the men were being held.
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